It's the Bryan Lair Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Today on the show, we'll have

a little August 1st fantasy call in. If you lived in France right now, you might be starting

a whole month of summer vacation. What would you do with that time if you had it? Paris

kind of shuts down in August in a way that New York and basically all of the United

States does not, right? Some other countries too, not just France, are less stingy with

summer weeks off. What would you do if you had that? And if you come from or have lived

in any country that does vacation differently or more, this time of year, tell us what

you did do with your dog days of August over there. That's coming up later in the show.

And speaking of France, maybe you've been hearing about the coup in the former French

colony of Niger against their democratically elected president, but the population and

neighboring countries seem to be divided about how to respond. Some European and nearby

African nations are threatening military intervention to restore democracy. Others are saying,

don't you dare. A headline in the financial time says, protesters surround French embassy

chanting pro-Russian slogans. And if that's confusing to you, we'll talk about the Niger

crisis, including how it's a new front in a way in the competition between the US and Russia,

the West in Russia for global influence. A headline on Politico says, Biden administration

unwilling to call Niger coup a coup. So we'll talk about that. But here's a headline you

might be surprised to learn, comes from the website's streets blog, which describes

itself as covering the battle against car dependency. They usually support all kinds of

non-car modes of transportation. The headline is, horrific crash on Manhattan bridge

spike path underscores moped crisis. So seeing streets blog referred to a moped crisis

might be a sign that the current chaos on streets around here is complicating how even

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